Thursday, May 04, 2017

First Love ~ Gwendoline Riley (Baileys Prize Short List 2017)

My quest to read the Bailey's Short List moved on from Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo to First Love by Gwendoline Riley.

And as an aside...can I ask you something.

Is anyone else struggling with what seems to be a trend for small print coupled with close-spaced lines in paperback books especially?

Filled with enthusiasm for my task, and wanting to spread-buy my book purchasing, I headed down to The Falmouth Bookseller for a copy of The Sport of Kings only to find that, for me at least, it was almost unreadable. Small print manageable on its own perhaps but not if you add in such tight line spacing. Now I only have glasses for reading, and I'm not even out of the I.0 category yet, nor has my eyesight changed much in the last four years, but I could tell there was an ocular migraine lurking therein and I can't tell you how upset I was to put the book down again. So for all those Kindle-Knockers out there all I can say is, if only for reason of enlarging fonts and spacing, what a blessing that they exist. That said, too much screen reading is another recipe for ocular migraines, so it's a Catch 22 brewing.

I almost wondered whether it was a ploy to make people buy on Kindle. More one-off purchases that can't be sold on, and have you noticed the steady climb in book prices on Kindles now.

Or an economic strategy to save on production costs perhaps? Squeeze more words into fewer pages, though you'd hope there would be at least one myopic publishing person who raised their hand in the planning meeting and said ' Think about the eyesight people.'

On the other hand it might just be me...

Anyway no such worries with First Love by Gwendoline Riley, well-spaced and readable and at 168 pages a marvel of precision.

Neve, a writer, is married to Edwyn, a curmudgeonly older man whose top skill would seem to be the verbal and emotional abuse of his wife. Slowly the details of Neve's life emerge...

The mother with the string of boyfriends...

The abusive father, 'the restless bully about town..'

And the dysfunctional relationships that have prevailed in Neve's life since childhood when her mother left her father and took Neve to live with her grandmother..

'I look back on a decade of barely managed helplessness.'

As the 'little mite with the basilisk stare,' it is clear that Neve will take problems into adulthood where they will need some therapeutic unravelling; a process that is hinted at rather than overtly stated and much-evident in Neve's patient handling of Edwyn's irrascible and unpredictable behaviour. Edwyn, crabby, waspish and dyspeptic targeting Neve with his constant put-downs in this toxic marriage, Neve, the soul of patience with her therapy-like responses.

Doesn't it sound depressing.

Not even the sort of thing I might willingly read given all those years of working in amongst it all..

But don't be put off, there is humour here too because there is Neve's mother, so needy of the approval of others, almost comedic and reminding me, for some reason of the role Julie Walters played as Victoria Wood's mother in the TV series Dinner Ladies. A mother who frequently 'bares her teeth' when she smiles and yet, for all her flightiness, unreliability and needy presence remains a constant in Neve's life.

Something committed me to finish this one within the first few pages and ultimately I found myself asking all those questions of old...

Has Neve effectively 'married' her father...

How inevitable is the impact of a dysfunctional childhood and a peripatetic lifestyle with its insecurities and instability in later life...

Neve, seeking and craving the security and stability of a home is clearly prepared to make sacrifices no matter the consequences, her own happiness secondary to fulfilling this one basic need, and yet the more I read the more I realised that, in a way, Neve's childhood had actually prepared and trained her to cope with this life, with Edwyn and his mood swings. Perhaps the most quoted line from Gwendoline Riley about her writing is her description of is as “picking at scabs and lying awake and mulling over things that it would really be much more cheerful not to mull over” and she is probably heartily sick of people quoting it back, but scabs are the right word too for Neve's old injuries, and after the scabs come the scars, indelible marks in Neve's personality that she has to work hard to conceal.

And all this revealed in 168 pages. First Love a short book (by today's standards) but one that extends itself well beyond the final page and into the after-read, those thoughts that drift into the thinking in the days that follow. Picking it up again to write about two weeks later and it is as clear, if not clearer.

Another very worthy Bailey's short lister and Gwendoline Riley a writer who is now firmly on my radar and with apparently four previous novels for me to discover.

Comments

My quest to read the Bailey's Short List moved on from Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo to First Love by Gwendoline Riley.

And as an aside...can I ask you something.

Is anyone else struggling with what seems to be a trend for small print coupled with close-spaced lines in paperback books especially?

Filled with enthusiasm for my task, and wanting to spread-buy my book purchasing, I headed down to The Falmouth Bookseller for a copy of The Sport of Kings only to find that, for me at least, it was almost unreadable. Small print manageable on its own perhaps but not if you add in such tight line spacing. Now I only have glasses for reading, and I'm not even out of the I.0 category yet, nor has my eyesight changed much in the last four years, but I could tell there was an ocular migraine lurking therein and I can't tell you how upset I was to put the book down again. So for all those Kindle-Knockers out there all I can say is, if only for reason of enlarging fonts and spacing, what a blessing that they exist. That said, too much screen reading is another recipe for ocular migraines, so it's a Catch 22 brewing.

I almost wondered whether it was a ploy to make people buy on Kindle. More one-off purchases that can't be sold on, and have you noticed the steady climb in book prices on Kindles now.

Or an economic strategy to save on production costs perhaps? Squeeze more words into fewer pages, though you'd hope there would be at least one myopic publishing person who raised their hand in the planning meeting and said ' Think about the eyesight people.'

On the other hand it might just be me...

Anyway no such worries with First Love by Gwendoline Riley, well-spaced and readable and at 168 pages a marvel of precision.

Neve, a writer, is married to Edwyn, a curmudgeonly older man whose top skill would seem to be the verbal and emotional abuse of his wife. Slowly the details of Neve's life emerge...

The mother with the string of boyfriends...

The abusive father, 'the restless bully about town..'

And the dysfunctional relationships that have prevailed in Neve's life since childhood when her mother left her father and took Neve to live with her grandmother..

'I look back on a decade of barely managed helplessness.'

As the 'little mite with the basilisk stare,' it is clear that Neve will take problems into adulthood where they will need some therapeutic unravelling; a process that is hinted at rather than overtly stated and much-evident in Neve's patient handling of Edwyn's irrascible and unpredictable behaviour. Edwyn, crabby, waspish and dyspeptic targeting Neve with his constant put-downs in this toxic marriage, Neve, the soul of patience with her therapy-like responses.

Doesn't it sound depressing.

Not even the sort of thing I might willingly read given all those years of working in amongst it all..

But don't be put off, there is humour here too because there is Neve's mother, so needy of the approval of others, almost comedic and reminding me, for some reason of the role Julie Walters played as Victoria Wood's mother in the TV series Dinner Ladies. A mother who frequently 'bares her teeth' when she smiles and yet, for all her flightiness, unreliability and needy presence remains a constant in Neve's life.

Something committed me to finish this one within the first few pages and ultimately I found myself asking all those questions of old...

Has Neve effectively 'married' her father...

How inevitable is the impact of a dysfunctional childhood and a peripatetic lifestyle with its insecurities and instability in later life...

Neve, seeking and craving the security and stability of a home is clearly prepared to make sacrifices no matter the consequences, her own happiness secondary to fulfilling this one basic need, and yet the more I read the more I realised that, in a way, Neve's childhood had actually prepared and trained her to cope with this life, with Edwyn and his mood swings. Perhaps the most quoted line from Gwendoline Riley about her writing is her description of is as “picking at scabs and lying awake and mulling over things that it would really be much more cheerful not to mull over” and she is probably heartily sick of people quoting it back, but scabs are the right word too for Neve's old injuries, and after the scabs come the scars, indelible marks in Neve's personality that she has to work hard to conceal.

And all this revealed in 168 pages. First Love a short book (by today's standards) but one that extends itself well beyond the final page and into the after-read, those thoughts that drift into the thinking in the days that follow. Picking it up again to write about two weeks later and it is as clear, if not clearer.

Another very worthy Bailey's short lister and Gwendoline Riley a writer who is now firmly on my radar and with apparently four previous novels for me to discover.

Constants...

Team Tolstoy

Team TolstoyA year-long shared read of War & Peace through the centenary year of Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's death, starting on his birthday, September 9th 2010.
Everyone is welcome to board the troika and read along, meeting here on the 9th of every month to chat in comments about the book.

Team Tolstoy BookmarkDon't know your Bolkonskys from your Rostovs?
An aide memoire that can be niftily printed and laminated into a double-sided bookmark.

Port Eliot Festival

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